Author: Amir Taaki 2012-05-28 16:25:51
Published on: 2012-05-28T16:25:51+00:00
The email conversation between Peter Vessenes and Stefan Thomas on the Bitcoin-development mailing list discusses the issue of punishing empty blocks. While slower confirmations could lead to higher fees, punishing 1-tx blocks is considered useless as it is easy to include a bogus second transaction. In addition, any additional challenges towards miners like hashes of the previous block are also not useful and may affect scalability in the future. There is an ethical aspect to consider as well, with the miner having the choice not to include a transaction. The right measures would be educating users about confirmation speed and fees and raising the default transaction fee. All markets must have a certain tension, and interfering with that will only keep transaction fees below market level, making the transition from inflation-financed hashing to transaction-financed hashing more painful and disruptive. Peter Vessenes suggests the idea of an open service where a miner can publish a short string in their conbase tying to the service and the service would have different metadata, including the miner's transaction guarantees. He had started a thread about this on bitcoin.org some time ago and offered to host such a service.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T04:49:18.155480+00:00